Welcome to the fourth issue of Wellness Press. On behalf of our editorial team, thank you for picking up, or clicking on, this issue.
Wellness Press is a platform for all members of the London Muslim Community to share ideas, debate problems, explore solutions, and raise the level of intellectual discourse in our community.
It is with that mission in mind that we return, each issue, to a simple but stubborn question: Why write and read together at all? At a time when digital media consumes much of our attention and artificial intelligence is increasingly producing or co-producing much of the texts we read, why ask a community to slow down and write, and to slow down again and read, when the current of the age is pulling so strongly in the opposite direction?
There are two main reasons why a community publication is not just a good thing to have in this moment in history, but something important and perhaps even necessary. The first is our need, as a community, for what organizational theorists call "collective sensemaking”: the ongoing, often messy process by which a group makes sense of the world when it defies our expectations. Writing is critical to this process because we do not always know what we think until we try to write it down. Likewise, we do not always know what we believe as a community until someone puts words to it and the rest of us respond, agree, push back, or elaborate. A publication like this one is not just a record of that process; it is the process.
The second is our need for "disciplined imagination." It is easy, especially now, to imagine the future carelessly; to let headlines and algorithms do our imagining for us. Disciplined imagination asks more of us. It asks that we picture what we want our community, practices, institutions, and shared life to look like, and that we do so with rigor and care, and with each other. We cannot sleepwalk into the future. If we do not imagine it deliberately, someone or something else will imagine our future for us.
It felt fitting, then, to devote this issue to a topic that reflects the significance of both discipline and collective action: Sports. Like faith and writing, sport is something we get better at only through practice, failure, and the willingness to keep going. There is something instructive in witnessing our capacity as humans to reach the limits of our abilities and then press slightly beyond them. In this issue, our contributors explore these themes from different angles, including perspectives that celebrate the virtues sport promotes and those that warn against some of its darker sides.
Future issues will take up subjects such as the affordability crisis, the future of education, financial literacy and independence, Islam and the arts, community entrepreneurship, and the digital transformation of society. If you have expertise or interest in these areas, or would like to contribute to any section of the publication, we'd love to hear from you at publications@muslimwellness.ca.
We are only at our fourth issue, but we have a wonderful team of individuals from the community helping to make this publication a reality: writers, editors, designers, and readers who have been generous with their time, their words, and their patience with us.
We are, in many ways, making the plane as we're flying it. We have not even determined what kind of plane it will become. What we do know is that we are building it together, in the open, issue by issue, learning, adapting, and growing as we go.
Thank you for flying with us. We hope you enjoy this issue.
With gratitude,
Isam Faik
On behalf of the Editorial Team